Eugenics what is it in science

Mankind Quarterly became a platform for race science—a place to publish questionable research under the trappings of objective science. Until recently, that journal had two eugenics supporters, Gerhard Heisenberg and Richard Lynn , on its editorial board. Even so, plenty of racist, young white men continue to promote concepts of scientific racism, such as the participants in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—an event that even the scientific journal Nature felt the need to condemn.

Even more well-meaning epidemiological scientists nonetheless still use race as a crude proxy for myriad social and environmental factors.

Saini cites an example of a study with statistical errors claiming that race and biology indicate that the airways of asthmatic black Americans become more inflamed than those of asthmatic white Americans.

These many forms of inequality and structural racism—which sociologists have documented for decades—were swept under the rug in favor of a race variable that led to findings that could be easily misinterpreted.

Indigenous rights activists, understandably sensitive to being exploited, resisted the project, surprising the naive scientists. Saini also explores the possibility of affirmative action policies, reparations or environmental justice advocacy, all intended to mitigate structural, historical and scientific racism.

Scientists in other fields have the freedom to study race, she writes, but with that freedom comes responsibility. The rest of us, too, need to be aware of racial stereotypes, lest we fall prey to them.

Race in America A Smithsonian magazine special report. In some cases, health care for living children was denied unless their mothers agreed to sterilization. In fact, he referred to American eugenics in his book, Mein Kampf. He believed Germans should do everything possible, including genocide , to make sure their gene pool stayed pure.

And in , the Nazis created the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring which resulted in thousands of forced sterilizations. During World War II, concentration camp prisoners endured horrific medical tests under the guise of helping Hitler create the perfect race. Josef Mengele , an SS doctor at Auschwitz , oversaw many experiments on both adult and child twins. He used chemical eyedrops to try and create blue eyes, injected prisoners with devastating diseases and performed surgery without anesthesia.

Thanks to the unspeakable atrocities of Hitler and the Nazis, eugenics lost momentum in after World War II, although forced sterilizations still happened. But as medical technology advanced, a new form of eugenics came on the scene. Modern eugenics, better known as human genetic engineering, changes or removes genes to prevent disease, cure disease or improve your body in some significant way. The potential health benefits of human gene therapy are staggering since many devastating or life-threatening illnesses could be cured.

But modern genetic engineering also comes with a potential cost. As technology advances, people could routinely weed-out what they consider undesirable traits in their offspring. Genetic testing already allows parents to identify some diseases in their child in utero which may cause them to terminate the pregnancy. As scientists embark on a new eugenics frontier, past failings can serve as a warning to approach modern genetic research with care and compassion.

University of Missouri. Charles Davenport and the Eugenics Record Office. Greek Theories on Eugenics. Journal of Medical Ethics. Josef Mengele. Holocaust Encyclopedia. Latina Women: Forced Sterilization. University of Michigan. Modern Eugenics: Building a Better Person? Nazi Medical Experiments. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!

For instance, in , the Nazi-controlled government issued the so-called "Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases," under which at least , Germans were involuntarily sterilized for having hereditary conditions such as mental illness, epilepsy, "feeblemindedness," or physical deformities Kennedy Institute of Ethics, The passage of such measures continued over the course of the decade, and by the late s, Hitler's eugenic-based national program of "race hygiene" had escalated into a program of euthanasia targeting both children and adults with various mental and physical disorders.

This policy eventually culminated in the ghastly deaths of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. In the s, the judges who presided over the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi doctors who performed experiments on concentration camp prisoners wisely recognized a need for oversight of medical experiments involving human subjects. As a result, the Nuremberg Code was formulated in , and it provided guidelines for research that are still adhered to today.

Other more recent protocols for research involving human subjects require such things as informed consent and adherence to strict policies aimed at protecting the welfare of subjects. Moreover, within the United States, any research program involving human trials must now be scrutinized by an impartial institutional review board IRB before the program can begin, and any adverse events that occur during experimentation must be reported and reviewed.

Despite the events of the past, there are still many individuals yet today who support eugenic arguments against the decision to knowingly give birth to a child with a genetic disorder, cognitive impairment, or physical disability. Society, however, must accept that one person's definition of "disabled" or "impaired" may be drastically different from another person's.

Deafness, for example, is seen by some as a disability and by others as merely a different way of living. Consider the case of a deaf lesbian couple in the U. Now, consider those parents who are either affected by or carriers of a genetic disorder who turn to modern techniques such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis to select for embryos that will be born without the genetic condition in question.

Stories such as these have refueled the ethical debate over " designer babies" and whether society has a right to choose what types of children are born. Of course, there are numerous other conditions that can be viewed as either disabling or empowering, depending on one's point of view.

For example, bipolar disorder is a condition in which an individual alternates between periods of euphoric creativity and activity and periods of debilitating depression. Because this disorder has a genetic component and tends to run in families, it would have been a likely target of the U. Today, however, bipolar suffers have access to treatments that allow most of them to lead normal lives; furthermore, some people would argue that eliminating bipolar disorder as a disease would also mean eliminating a positive intellectual force in society.

Indeed, the Internet is rife with lists of well-respected intellectuals and artists who are rumored to have suffered from bipolar disorder.

The decision to treat, rather than eliminate, bipolar disorder seems obvious when considering the societal contributions made by some of these individuals. Western geneticists and genetic counselors now make great efforts to avoid projecting their opinions and philosophies onto their patients, and they instead strive to educate their patients so that these individuals can make their own decisions regarding their genetic health.

Although this concept of nondirective counseling is widely accepted in the West, it may never become standard in other parts of the world. In China, for example, moral values are strongly influenced by the Buddhist and Taoist religions and by Marxism. There is a strong ideology that regards each person as a small component of society, as well as widespread sentiment that an individual's interests should be subordinate to the interests of the nation.

Therefore, it is not surprising that many Chinese geneticists strive to improve population quality and further eugenic principles, a goal clearly at odds with Western ideology Mao, Indeed, it is examples such as this that highlight the importance of remembering the eugenic mistakes of the past so that they do not occur again in the future. Galton, F. Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. Mao, X. Ethics and genetics in China: An inside story.

Nature Genetics 17 , 20 doi Spriggs, M. Lesbian couple create a child who is deaf like them. Journal of Medical Ethics 28 , Bioethics in Genetics. Genetic Inequality: Human Genetic Engineering.

Questionable Prognostic Value of Genetic Testing. Human Subjects and Diagnostic Genetic Testing. Prenatal Screen Detects Fetal Abnormalities. Legislative Landmarks of Forensics: California v. Greenwood and Shed DNA. Calculation of Complex Disease Risk. Gene Therapy. Personalized Medicine: Hope or Hype? Pharmacogenetics, Personalized Medicine, and Race. Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine. Medical Careers: Genetic Screening and Diagnostics. Citation: Norrgard, K. Nature Education 1 1